7 Resolutions for Your Website in 2012

Happy New Year everyone! It’s a clean slate, full of possibilities, and that includes opportunities to take a fresh look at your website and set some fresh goals for the new year. Have you set goals for your website and online commumications this year? If you have, share them in a comment. If you haven’t yet consider these….

7 Resolutions for Your Website in 2012

1) Give your site a new look. If it’s been 2-3 years since you’ve changed the look of your site, it’s time. You don’t have to have the coolest, cutting edge website on the planet, but you do want to make sure your site doesn’t look behind the times.

2) Keep your website up to date all the time. Resolve to update your website at least once a week and any time there is news or announcements. You’ll probably be most successful keeping this resolution if you schedule a specific day and time to do it.

3) Optimize for search engines. Getting your site to the first page of the search results for keywords relevant to your site is a great goal for any organization. If you are just hoping for the best when it comes to search engines, you are missing out on so much potential. If your site is for a church, school, or local business, search engine optimization (SEO) services will almost more than pay for themselves with the new customers, members, and students they produce.

4) Email a newsletter. If you don’t send out a regular email newsletter, you are just hoping that people remember to come back to your site. An email newsletter is one of the few opportunities you have to proactively bring people back to your website. Your current members, visitors, or customers are the best target demographic ever, so reconnecting with them on a regular basis is one of the smartest things you could do this year.

5) Engage with social media. Resolve to take the next step with social media. Maybe that’s the first step – setting up accounts and adding links to them on your website. Maybe it’s developing for specific content and posts each day of the week. Maybe it’s time to stop broadcasting on social media and start asking questions and interacting.

6) Add to your communications team. If you are the only one managing your website and social media, you are probably holding back the potential of your website. We’re all limited in the amount of time we have to put into our websites, so one of the best things you can do is train and delegate some of the work to others. Perhaps there’s someone in your organization who would like to just update the photo galleries, do the sermon podcast, or manage the calendar. Plus to engage in social media well, you need additional contributors and people commited to sharing and engaging with you.

7) Upgrade to a Custom Site with Content Management System (CMS). If you built your website with a web builder like NE1 or if you designed it yourself with HTML or software like Dreamweaver, there is a whole ‘nother level to what you could accomplish with a custom, CMS-based website. In fact getting a CMS-based website will actually help you accomplish all 6 of the other suggested resolutions above.

Well, those are my suggestions. I’d love to hear the goals you’ve set for your website for 2012. Post ‘em in the comments.

4 Comments

I agree with you on the importance of keeping a blog up to date. It's very disheartening to come across a new blog that looks interesting and worthwhile, and find that the last post was two or three years ago.

Hi James, the cost depends on the functionality you'd like built into your website. If you go to http://www.ourchurch.com/design/ and complete the consultation request form, we can schedule a time for you to discuss the goals you have for your website and the cost of a new website.